The Object is Not Health, Nor is it Care. The Object is Control.

The Object is Not Health, Nor is it Care. The Object is Control. by The Elephant's Child

February 27, 2010, 9:26 pm
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Economy, Health Care | Tags: Model for the Left, National Health Service, Societal Control

The aim of the Left for many years has been a socialized health care system like that of Great Britain.  That is what the 2,700 page Senate bill proposes. Their ideal is control.  Simple and straightforward.  They assume that what they are doing is good, because they envision it as giving good health care to the poor.

Uninterested in evidence, uninterested in details, and uninterested in thinking through each mandate they have stuck in, they simply have no understanding of what the bill they so passionately demand to pass will do.  Nancy Pelosi exemplifies this when she announces that their health care bill is a jobs bill.  She claims it will create 400,000 jobs. This may come as a complete surprise to members of Congress, but government jobs are a drain on society.  The fewer there are, the better.

The problem with our current health care system is cost.  We have the world’s best health care, but costs are increasing across the board, and particularly in entitlements — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  The first baby boomers reach age 65 this year.  The numbers increase through the peak year of 2024, when they begin to taper off.

If Democrats get their way,America will adopt a system much like the one that is killing patients in Great Britain.  The U.K.’s health care has been held up as a model by the Left for years.  What they have planned for U.S. health care is not a copy of the British system, but a nationalized plan will soon collapse like other socialist programs.  Government-run health care is unsustainable and deadly.

In Britain the Mid-Stratfordshire National Health Service Trust was the focus of a recent independent inquiry.  According to media reports , the review found that at least 400 and as many as 1,200 patients died because of poor care.

The source of these dreadful problems are hospital managers — bureaucrats — who, according to a  Times of London report, “stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.”

The 455-page report is packed with examples that should be the shame of the British health care system. It documents patient deaths due to what appear to be cases of neglect and misdiagnosis. There are records of patients falling, developing infections, left sitting on toilets and not properly fed.

Author Robert Francis says he heard “many accounts of bad care, denials of dignity and unnecessary suffering” from witnesses during his review.

The inquiry also noted “serious departures from the standard of basic care which every patient is entitled to expect” — abuses of elderly patients, a culture of bullying, low staff morale and concerns about the “attitude of staff to patients” as well as to visitors.

Even staff members “lived in an atmosphere of fear,” in part due to “the managerial styles of some senior managers.”

Judging by the report, the hospital resembled a landfill or sewage treatment plant as much as it did a house of healing. Patients went unwashed, as did their bedding, which was “soiled with urine and feces for considerable periods of time.” There were “cases of patients who had soiled themselves who were dependent on their relatives to clean them.”

If you won’t do the things that evidence shows actually do reduce costs, like tort reform, eliminating fraud and waste, putting consumers in charge of managing their own health care; then you are stuck with consistently adding more rules and mandates in the attempt to bring costs down. That’s where the rules come from that killed so many British people.

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